Despite Success Stories,
Working With a Spouse
Is Very Risky Business

It's generally a really bad idea to fire an employee at her home, but there's a notable exception: when that employee is your wife.

In that case, it's an abysmal idea.

Though he loves her dearly, Gabe Karp had never liked the idea of working with his spouse, Rachel. "I'd rather go to a dentist appointment every day of the week," he says.

Part of the problem was that his wife tended to want more "Honey-Sweetie" displays of affection than Mr. Karp was willing to provide at the office. He also had a habit of using his "work tone of voice" -- curt, staccato bullet points -- when he talked to her. "You don't have to speak to me that way," she would say. "You can ask nicely." And when he raised an issue about her work, she sometimes took it personally and countered with a retort like, "Oh yeah, well I noticed you left your dishes in the sink this morning."

The situation had developed almost by accident: In June 2004, when Ms. Karp, an attorney, was about to take maternity leave from her company, she asked her husband, an attorney at a law firm, to do some work for the interactive-promotions agency. While she was away, her husband's role grew to include her job. She eventually returned part-time, but it soon became clear that the fast growing business needed its attorneys to work full time.

But that didn't make the task of laying her off any easier for Mr. Karp, who was urged to do the dastardly deed by the company's chief operations officer. So he waited until they were at home together one day, and after a long buildup he told her, "Honey, I'm gonna have to let you go." Ms. Karp understood the business wisdom of what he was doing. But don't think she's forgotten: "Don't forget you took my job and you fired me," she reminds him regularly.

The media are filled with stories about husbands and wives sweetly banding together to build businesses. And no doubt there are countless couples -- the proverbial moms and pops -- who have found a way to take their marriage to work. But if you can't talk about your spouse as a "life partner" without a wince and you can't stand watching your husband leave the Liquid Paper as well as the toothpaste uncapped, then odds are you aren't a candidate.

"I believe about 5% of couples can pull it off," says Azriela Jaffe, a writer who has coached couples who work together. "There are very few couples who want to be together 24-7, and it's not a reflection on how much they love one another."

Certainly, American marriages don't need any more help falling apart. "Fifty percent of them will break up," says David Popenoe, co-director of Rutgers University's National Marriage Project. "If you were to add the dimension of working together, you'd probably see an increase."

Cassie Crandell met her future husband at the accounting firm where she worked, and they worked in cubicles just five feet apart after they were married. On the one hand, they got to see each other all the time. On the other hand, they had to see each other all the time. "Work was all you ever talked about," she says.

After four years, the two divorced. They had had a tough time developing independence from each other and never expanded their circle of friends. And it was the little things that really got on their nerves. For example, Ms. Crandell's husband had been a drummer in his college marching band, and he had a habit of creating drums from nondrum surfaces, including her head. "Not only did I have to put up with that at home, I had to listen to the tap-tap-tapping at work," she says. Both are happier now, but had they not worked together, she believes, their marriage "would have had a much better shot."

Clearly, couples that have succeeded at working together have managed to cope not only with the big areas of conflict but also with the small. La Verne Lemen and her husband, John, run an office-furniture dealership, and they have worked together for nine of the 21 years they've been married. It helps to have aptitudes "that don't overlap," she says. But it used to drive her crazy that Mr. Lemen, who has six coffee cups on his desk as we speak, didn't throw anything away, including those little paper tags stapled to his dry cleaning. "We've learned to let the little stuff go and not worry about it," she says, adding that now she just stuffs the cleaning tags in his pockets when he leaves them lying around.

Still, there are pragmatic reasons not to work together, including the risk of putting all your financial eggs in one basket. "It's a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad idea," says Claire Wexler, who met her husband at work and got married in 2000, a month before both of them were laid off. Both eventually found new jobs at a second company and then proceeded to be laid off from there.

And there's yet another problem: When you don't work together, you may suspect your spouse goofs off at work. But when you work together, you know it. "I knew that the 'hellacious appointment' -- or how hard he had had to work all week -- wasn't always true because I knew he was golfing three or four days that week," Ms. Wexler says. Responds her husband, Davian Wexler: "That's exactly true. I worked hard but I did go out and have a good time too."

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